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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26178286">monster days, miracle days, and other words that begin with ‘m’</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyedscale/pseuds/greyedscale'>greyedscale</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ushiten week 2020 [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Autistic Ushijima Wakatoshi, Bullying, Demisexual Ushijima Wakatoshi, Homophobia, M/M, Pansexual Tendou Satori, Pre-Relationship, Tendou Satori Needs a Hug, Whump, guess monster, i think..., no beta we die like Satori’s opponents’ hearts, not all character describing tags are mentioned but they’re hcs ok, the burn is so slow it’s not even in this fic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:29:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,635</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26178286</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyedscale/pseuds/greyedscale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times satori was called a monster and one time he wasn’t (one time he was called a miracle)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Tendou Satori/Ushijima Wakatoshi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ushiten week 2020 [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893910</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>321</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Ushiten Week 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>monster days, miracle days, and other words that begin with ‘m’</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong> M O N S T E R  D A Y S </strong>
</p><p>一． mate (noun): <em>archaic</em> – match, peer</p><p>When Mama had signed Satori up for the neighborhood volleyball camp, Satori had thought this was his chance to make a new friend. He was wrong. The moment he had introduced his name–no, the moment his supposed peers had seen his awful bowl cut, the only hair style he was able to give himself–they had labelled him as <em>different</em>.</p><p>“Hello, my name is Tendou Satori. Please take care of me,” Satori remembers introducing himself politely, the same as everyone else.</p><p>“Tendou…Satori?” He hears another child, one with an undercut repeat. He smiles hesitantly.</p><p>“Yeah.” He feels his heart beating faster. This could be his first f-</p><p>“Heaven child…. Satori…. He must be the monster sent to scare us into working hard,” the other child comments. <em>What? Monster?</em></p><p>“I haven’t heard about that youkai before,” another questions.</p><p>“You haven’t?” Undercut frowns, “<em>Satori</em>…they’re mind reading monkey monsters that read your mind and then kill you when they’re done playing with you and bored.”</p><p>“Oh…I can kind of see it,” the other boy replies, “He kind of looks like a monster, doesn’t he?”</p><p><em>Oh. So, this is what people are like outside of his house.</em> <em>Oh.</em></p><p>“Hey!” The kid with the undercut snaps in his face, and Satori instinctively flinches back, squeezing his eyes shut. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, Monster!”</p><p>“Why,” Satori asks even as he flinches away from his peer.</p><p>“I don’t answer to you,” the kid replies, turning to leave, throwing a single comment over his shoulder that will haunt Satori for <em>years</em>, “Don’t come to our team, Tendou! Monsters aren’t allowed on human teams!”</p><p>It’s the day Satori learns to harden his heart and lower his expectations. <em>Satori</em>, he muses in his thoughts, <em>a monkey monster that uses its mind-reading powers to kill.</em> It’s a bittersweet start that what will eventually become his guess blocking style, but in the meantime, Satori is left alone, the wounds in his heart festering even as he discovers his passion for volleyball.</p><p>二． match (noun): a person or thing equal or similar to another</p><p>Middle School was supposed to mean better peers, strong teammates. It was supposed to be where he meets his match on the court. Instead, Satori finds himself becoming bored with it all. What’s the point if he doesn’t get to play the way that he feels is right? What’s the point if he’s going to be yelled at anyway? What’s the point if he still doesn’t have anyone to really be friends with.</p><p>“Satoriiii!” His coach yells at him, arms crossed in irritation. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t jump just on your hunch!”</p><p>“But I’ve scored a ton of points just on my hunches,” Tendou tries to justify despite knowing she wouldn’t believe in him.</p><p>Her expression hardens. He gets it, okay? She doesn’t like him either…. He knows that. “That’s not going to happen all the time. There are limits to individual skills.”</p><p><em>But individual skills are the only things I have</em>, Tendou can’t help but desperately think. <em>For someone with no friends, no allies, individual skills are the </em>only <em>things you can rely on</em>. Instead, he throws his arms up in a loose shrug, replying aloud, “There’s no point if you don’t feel good now.”</p><p>He starts walking away from the net as his coach scowls in the background. He’s almost made it to the wall, when he hears quiet voices drift out of the storage room.</p><p>“Practice always stops when Tendou’s around, though it’s nice to be able to rest,” another bland voice complains.</p><p>He hears someone humming in assent, before adding, “Or rather, Tendou’s sort of scary. You never know what he’s thinking.”</p><p>Satori hears a small huff of laughter. “I know right?” <em>Some teammates they are…</em>, but in the end, they’re just proving his point about individual strengths being the only thing he can rely on.</p><p>He starts to walk away, and as if the two ‘teammates’ think they’re safe to continue gossiping, the last thing Satori hears from them is one of the boys whispering, “I mean, no wonder everyone calls him a monster.”</p><p>三． monster (noun): one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character</p><p>It’s during the Spring Tournament that Satori hears it for the first time, the whispered nickname his opponent had christened him with: Guess Monster. His team’s just finished up a match with another no-name team where Satori has scored close to a third of the points for the team–a point rate larger than that of the spikers on his team. His coach is glaring at him, which lets him know that he’s in for another lecture the moment they walk of the court.</p><p>So, he takes his time, slouching as he saunters his way off court, trailing behind the rest of his…teammates. And, it’s then, that he hears someone from the audience whisper it.</p><p>“There, in the red hair, Number Ten, you see him?” Out of the corner of his eye, Satori sees someone in another school’s uniform elbowing his teammate.</p><p>The teammate looks bored. “Yeah, what’s so special about him? Sure you can tell he’s gonna be pretty tall, especially after whatever growth spurt he hits in high school…but he’s too lean to be a spiker.”</p><p>“No, it’s his blocking that monstrous. It’s like he can read minds,” the boy shudders before continuing, “Apparently instead of read-blocking or commit-blocking, he has his own style–guess blocking.”</p><p>“So…<em>he’s</em> the <em>Guess Monster</em>, huh?”</p><p>“Yeah, just watch his next match; you’ll see how creepy it is.”</p><p>“Sure.” It doesn’t sound like his friend really believes him.</p><p>Satori decides he should just leave. No sense in sticking around just to have his heart shatter even more; no, he’ll be the one shattering hearts around here. So, he makes his way out of the court and waits through his coach’s lecture for the next match.</p><p>At the end of that day, he’s heard the nickname many more times, whispered like a taboo. Satori wonders why he’s always the one being called a monster. <em>I… just wanted to play volleyball that makes me feel good.</em></p><p>四． mother (noun): (i) a female parent (ii) a woman in authority</p><p>He’s in his second year of middle school when his mother finds out. It wasn’t anything particularly offensive that tipper her off, and he would correct her biased stereotypes if it weren’t for the fact that <em>she was right </em>in this case and he’s frozen in panic, wondering how he’s going to get out of this one.</p><p>“You can’t be serious, Satori,” she deadpans incredulously.</p><p>Satori swallows hard, maintains eye contact with her shoulders, and stays silent.</p><p>“Get out,” she whispers hardly, “We are Tendou’s–Heaven’s children–and you dare sully that with your…what are you children calling it nowadays?” His mother stares at him expectantly.</p><p>He swallows again, feeling the unpleasant dryness of the roof of his mouth. “Pan…I’m pansexual,” he confesses like it’s the gravest sin–which, to his mother, it is.</p><p>“Well, <em>Satori</em>, we can’t have <em>monsters</em> like you sullying our good name.” She glares at him for a measured moment. “Didn’t I tell you to get out?”</p><p>“W-what about my things?” Satori ventures to ask.</p><p>“I’ll have a bag sent.”</p><p>“Where am I supposed to go?” he questions, defeated, shoulders slumping.</p><p>“Anywhere that’s not here.”</p><p>“May I get my homework?”</p><p>She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You have two minutes to get out of my sight, Monster. How you spend those two minutes is not my problem.”</p><p>Satori scrambles to gather up his laptop, his homework, his team uniform and jacket, and a volleyball before leaving.</p><p>All he had wanted to do was say that the volleyball player in the magazine he had seen was cute.</p><p>五．move (noun): a change of residence or location</p><p>Satori ends up moving in with his aunt. She lives far enough away that his parents can pretend she hadn’t cleaned up their problem for them. Because as much as his mother had said she didn’t care where he ended up, it still would have been a disgrace on the family if he had wandered around, dirty and unkempt claiming to be a <em>Tendou</em>.</p><p>So, his aunt takes him in, tells him she doesn’t care what he does with his time, where he goes, all of it. She doesn’t care about any of it as long as he keeps it outside of her house and isn’t caught where he could be recognized.</p><p>He starts spiking his hair up, washing out the gel only after practice when he was about to go home. And despite his teammates seeing him with both hairstyles, they don’t seem to make the connection between Tendou Satori, the estranged child of <em>the </em>Tendou family, and Tendou Satori, the Guess Monster. Maybe it’s that he acts very differently, learns to be exactly what people expect of him even as he’s reading their minds, breaking their hearts on the court, surprising them with a block. He is every bit as brittle, obscure, and mysterious as they want a monster to be.</p><p>He starts to hear that name everywhere. The <em>Guess Monster</em> did this. The <em>Guess Monster</em> did that. The <em>Guess Monster</em> scored half his team’s points. <em>Guess Monster</em>. <em>Guess Monster</em>. <em>Guess Monster</em>.</p><p>It’s closing in on him now. The moment he steps on a court, he can hear the words pressing up to him, constricting so, so tightly. He can’t breathe on the court anymore, but his guesses become sharper as he becomes warier. Playing his volleyball his way… no longer makes him happy. He wonders if he should quit volleyball, when he sees <em>him</em> play a game, which decides the rest of his life.</p><p><em>Him</em>. If he can get on the same team as <em>him</em> in high school… he’ll stay in this paradise gone hell for three more years…, and if not, well, it’s not like volleyball had really wanted him there in the first place.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong> M I R A C L E  D A Y S </strong>
</p><p>一． miracle (noun): an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment</p><p>He makes it into Shiratorizawa somehow, and it’s like his paradise is reborn–or rather, nothing has had him running out of the building yet, gasping for breath as the walls seem to close in on him. No one’s called him a monster yet, but no one’s called him his name yet either. Perhaps… his perception that Shiratorizawa could revive his paradise is due to the words the coach had told him during his interview.</p><p><em>“I don’t have any complaints, as long as you can score,”</em> Tanji had said after a short pause.</p><p>Well, he better not have been lying.</p><p>It’s the first day of practice, and they members are lined up by position with the upperclassmen and Tanji’s hand-picked freshmen positioned more towards the front.</p><p>“Ushijima. Semi. Oohira. Tendou. Morinozuka. Iwatani,” he lists. <tt>[1]</tt> “Come over here.” As they make their way over, Tanji starts calling some second years’ names out. By the time everyone is lined up, Satori is ready to start fidgeting. He knows it’s just his imagination, but he feels like the walls have been inching their way closer and closer, and-</p><p>“You will all play a practice match after warming up. Second years, show the first years the warmups. First years, if you lose, you will no longer be considered on the B team and will have to join the rest of the students trying out for the C team,” Tanji turns to the older students, “Second years, you know the punishment for losing already.” They all nod in unison.</p><p>“Get going then.” Tanji spares a single glance for Ushijima and gives the tiniest of nods. Ushijima does not seem to react in any way.</p><p>They all start the warmups in silence, Satori eventually feeling relaxed enough to start chatting. The game starts with Satori’s reputation as an easy-going chatterbox cemented. He’ll observe for now and pull out the big guns later.</p><p>It’s a very standard game to begin with, except for Ushijima’s spikes because (1) holy shit he’s <em>left-</em>handed and (2) he has the most beautiful form and forceful spikes Satori has ever seen. Semi is playing setter, and as expected of Tanji’s choice, there’s a certain flair to his movements as well. Oohira seems to be one of those solid all-around players but with more height and broader shoulders than most people know what to do with. Morinozuka is the other middle blocker, and Iwatani seems to have made the team for his height only. His plays are very basic, but definitely something Satori can work around.</p><p>He starts out syncing up read blocks to Semi and Oohira, scoring a couple solid one-touches and some points too. But it’s too slow. Everything’s too slow, and Satori can feel the itch to move rise within him. He makes a decision. The first set is almost over with a pretty close score, but it’s obvious the first years are going to take the win. He’s observed the opposing team enough times to get into their psyche. Satori’s going to start guess blocking in the next game.</p><p>The third year playing ref blows his whistle, and the two make-shift teams trudge off court to switch sides for their next match. Satori takes this moment to pull Semi and Oohira aside into a mini huddle.</p><p>“Look, the next time we block, just ignore everything I do, and block as you normally would.”</p><p>Oohira nods his assent. Semi opens his mouth to ask why.</p><p>Satori smirks what could be called a sinister grin, “If you don’t get in my way, I promise I’ll score as many if not more points than UshiWaka over there.” The three look over to the stoic ace.</p><p>“Bet,” Semi challenges.</p><p>“Loser buys winner the next copy of Shounen Jump,” Satori replies almost immediately. They shake on it while Oohira shakes his head fondly.</p><p>The game starts with a few service aces on their side. Satori isn’t paying attention, he’s focused on observing every single movement, every twitch of a muscle the opposing team makes. The moment he’s rotated to the front, he knows he’s ready. Morinozuka serves the ball, and the opponent’s second row middle blocker receives it. It’s a clean receive. Satori lazily glances at the setter out of the corner of his eye. <em>B Quick</em>. Satori jumps, taped fingers sliding into view even as their center is already spiking the ball. he slams the ball down, savoring the spikers look of despair.</p><p>“That was a miracle.” Satori hears an unfamiliar, almost monotone voice (it’s tinged with the slightest hint of awe which Satori can only tell because he used to be like that, trained himself to over-express his emotions in order to not have another aspect be thrown in his face as monstrous). Satori turns around to see the olive-haired ace with an intense expression on his face. “That block was a miracle.”</p><p>Satori glances around to see Oohira and Iwatani both positioned to the right. Ah, the setter must have tried faking to the right after Satori had already started jumping and stopped looking.</p><p>“How did you know that they were going center and not right?” the left-handed teen’s voice booms.</p><p>Satori straightens up, puffs his chest out a little, pointing dramatically at himself with the first genuine smile he’s had in a while. Miracle… he likes the sound of that word. It seems his paradise has been reborn after all. He points at himself with his right thumb. “Haven’t you heard? I’m the Miracle Boy Satori, Wakatoshi-kun.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><strong>[note 1]</strong> All word definitions were taken from <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/">Merriam-Webster</a>.<br/><strong>[note 2]</strong> come scream with my friends and i: <a href="https://discord.gg/GTNHyNr"> https://discord.gg/GTNHyNr</a><br/>(although the server is mainly for the bnha fandom)<br/><strong>[1]</strong> The two extra names are unimportant OC’s. I took the names from <em>Ouran High School Host Club</em> (Morinozuka) and <em>The Rising of the Shield Hero</em> (Iwatani).</p></blockquote></div></div>
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